2022
Definitions
The business logic behind the insurance industry (from the perspective of a private person to keep it simple) is the following: you pay a limited sum of money to cover the risk that something terrible will happen - like having a car accident or your house burning down. If one of those events does actually happen, you then receive a big sum of money to cover the costs resulting from the unfortunate incident.
This service is provided by an insurance company, of which there is typically (in terms of physical presence) one or only a few per brand per country, typically based in the capital or major cities. In most cases, consumers are not purchasing the service directly from them, but from a person in between. That can be either someone representing the insurance company in a local branch, an insurance agency, or a person negotiating on the consumer’s behalf to get the best deal from several insurance companies, an insurance broker. These intermediate agents or brokers are much more abundant (again in terms of physical presence), often with a local office in every city, town or even village.
Categories available on Maps
Top level categories
Perfectly in line with the description outlined above there are 3 ‘top level’ categories available on Google Maps to use for each of the three different parties in the sector:
- Insurance company
- Insurance agency
- Insurance broker
More specific categories
Some businesses offer specific types of insurances, and for those a number of additional categories are available. There are currently 8 of them:
- Auto insurance agency
- Dental insurance agency
- Health insurance agency
- Home insurance agency
- Income protection insurance
- Life insurance agency
- Motorcycle insurance agency
- Renter's insurance agency
Related categories (but out of scope for this post)
Some other categories are clearly related to the insurance domain, but primarily belong to other clusters (in this case education and legal), and are therefore not dealt with here. (This does not automatically mean there might not be issues with them, as they might certainly pop up when the posts covering those domains will be published.)
- Insurance school
- Insurance attorney
Problems with the English terms
The top level categories are fine, both in terms of the number of them (nothing missing at that level, in my view) as the terminology used for them. The more specific ones, however, are highly problematic.
- 7 of the more specific categories have the word agency in the category name, but seem to refer to insurance companies offering an insurance covering a specific domain, rather than local branches acting as intermediate between an insurance company and consumers - as the term agency suggests. Some of the POIs (Points Of Interest) on Maps currently carrying one of those specific categories do have the word agency in their name, but inspecting their website clearly shows that their activity in the insurance sector is rather what one would call a type of insurance company, not a type of insurance agency. To single out just one example: Motorcycle insurance agency. There are definitely companies that are specialized in offering such insurance policies (especially if racing is involved), but I can hardly imagine a local insurance agency in a small town offering this type of insurance only – would be quite a tough business model to uphold, presumably.
- The category Income insurance protection only has (in US English) the name of a type of insurance without any additional term to define the type of business. Oddly, the UK English equivalent does have this: Income Insurance Protection Company (which is by the way the addition that makes most sense).
- There is a content-inconsistency between the US English and UK English term for Auto insurance agency: the UK English version is Car and Motor Insurance Agency, so that covers a wider range of vehicles than the US English Auto insurance agency.
- Spelling-inconsistency in the UK English category names (you will see this one return in all upcoming posts of this series, as this is a problem in general): in some cases only the first word of the term is capitalized (e.g. Health insurance agency), for other categories all words are capitalized (e.g. Home Insurance Agency).
Problems with the translated terms
There is one major issue that eclipses all others: the category insurance company is often not available in other languages, and in the languages where it is available, it is not translated consistently.
A close second in terms of ‘major-issue-ness’ is the fact that in quite a few languages the translation for insurance agency is in fact the word or phrase that should have been used as translation for insurance company. Quite grave accusations, you might now think, so let’s dive into the specifics to substantiate them (and list the “smaller” issues while we’re at it).
- In 6 out of 14 languages I checked, the category insurance company does not have a translation: Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech; remarkable side note: in the Spanish list for Latin American countries (e.g. Mexico) a localized version is available
- In 8 out of 14 languages I checked, the translation for Insurance agency contains a term that is the local equivalent of company, not agency: Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico), Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech and Portuguese (Portugal) – the version in Portuguese (Brazil) is fine though. You will notice that this largely matches the list from the first point, and the result is that in those countries hundreds of places have the underlying correct category (agency) but are displayed incorrectly (company).
- In Czech the situation is even more bizarre, as Insurance broker has a translation containing the word agent.
- In Portugese both Insurance company and Insurance agency are translated by the exact same term. Oops, sorry, I have to make a correction here. Not the exact same term… it’s Companhia de Seguros for one and Companhia de seguros for the other (in case you have trouble spotting it: the s in seguros is capitalized in one, but not in the other – let’s hope the local guides in Portugal have an eye for detail and a good memory to remember which one should be used in which case).
- In the more specific categories, some terms in some languages have no addition to indicate the type of business – the term is just a type of insurance. Some examples: the Dutch Autoverzekering for Auto insurance agency, the German Motorradversicherung for Motorcycle insurance agency.
- The more specific categories have a mixture of company-, broker- and agency-additions to indicate the type of business
The Fix
To enable the appropriate correction of most problems I therefore suggest to:
- Make sure that Insurance company is available in all languages
- Translate Insurance agency in all languages with a term referring to an agency not to company
- Check if agency is the best fitting term as the type of business indicator in the more specific categories and replace it with company where that is needed
- Add a type of business indicator where this is missing
- Unify the capitalization in the UK English terms
The series
This post is the first of a series of Categories Explained (?) posts meant to illustrate the sometimes dramatically confusing situations local guides currently face when having to select the appropriate category for a place on Google Maps. The series’ goals are:
- Suggest specific improvements to the current list of categories available to local guides
- Single out category domains and define the content of the categories in it
- Convince the Google Maps team of the fact that there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to categories, and that this involves hundreds of thousands of points of interest on Maps
- Convince the Google Maps team of the fact that at least part of the solution can be to leverage the knowledge of local guides around the globe – and this, dear reader, is where I need your help. The research I have done for this post is based on European languages only, so please check what the situation is in your local language and report on that in a comment to this post.
Related posts
How to check category translations
Categories Explained (?) – Wellness
Categories Explained (?) – Ball Sports
